The Rich Roll Podcast - The Strava Story: Building A Fitness Community Fueled By Emotional Connection

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Riding up a local canyon climb back in what must have been late 2009, my Airstream-dwelling, frequent cycling compadre Stu Bone couldn't stop talking about this brand new social network specifically aimed at the 2-wheel community. Always eager to test new tech, I signed up immediately, quickly fell in love and have been evangelizing the platform every since. Meet Strava – the fitness social network designed by athletes for athletes. Evolving beyond it’s cycling roots as a platform for all who sweat, today Strava is widely embraced as the premier workout sharing fitness network — a rapidly expanding ecosystem of Olympic, professional, elite, amateur and beginner athletes that boasts over 1 million new registered new users every month and growing. What distinguishes Strava from other fitness trackers and social media platforms is the positive emotional connection it engenders. Encouraging and community oriented, it’s devoid of the negativity and toxicity that plagues most sharing networks. There’s something uniquely special about being privy to the daily grind of my favorite multi-sport athletes. Their transparency holds me accountable. In turn I help hold my community accountable. And openly sharing our collective fitness experience – the highs and the lows — makes all of us better. So just how did Strava become the only fitness app that matters? To get the story behind the story, today I sit down with Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath — the dynamic duo co-founders who gave birth to Strava and continue to guide it's ongoing growth and evolution. Currently Strava’s interim CFO, Michael Horvath previously served as Chief Executive Officer from 2010-2013 and President from 2014-2017. Holding a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University and an A.B. in economics from Harvard (where he was men’s lightweight crew team captain), Michael is a former Stanford economics professor and entrepreneurship professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Prior to Strava, Michael co-founded enterprise software firm Kana Communications and was the CFO and VP of Operations at GlycoFi, a biotech company. Mark Gainey currently serves as the co-founder and chairman of Strava. Also a Harvard graduate, Mark is a former venture capital executive and seasoned entrepreneur who has been building successful companies for nearly 20 years, including Kana, which he co-founded alongside Michael as CEO, president, and chairman. In addition, Mark sits on the board of Alter-G, BoardVantage, Daum, Clari, and Coaching Corps. Michael and Mark initially met on the crew team at Harvard. Friendship ensued, but after graduation they pursued disparate paths. Mark went into venture capital in Palo Alto. Michael became an academic. Reunited when Michael took a professorship at Stanford, they hatched their first startup. Kana Communications was a massive triumph. Little did they know that their follow up act — a passion project born out of a mutual love for fitness — would eclipse their first company's success, reshaping the fitness landscape for millions of athletes across the world. This exchange canvasses everything from technology, business and entrepreneurship to fitness, sports and social media. But at it’s core, it's a conversation about community. How to create it. How to nurture it. And why the integrity of community is paramount. I love Strava. As an early adopter (I was the 14,443 person to sign up for the service), it's my pleasure to share Mark and Michael's story with you today. Disclosure: In the interest of total transparency, I have run ad campaigns for Strava on this podcast in the past. Enjoy! Rich

We offer something that's unique and really important, which is there are like-minded individuals who are there on Strava. We have the community that will be supportive. Every week, we'll get another story from a community member and the impact that Strava had. And that's what makes it worth it. That's the why. I would add to that to think about what Strava can do for you

when you're just starting out is people motivate people. And so connecting to other people is that step that I think completes the loop. It brings you into this world, into this community. As Mark said, they're there to support you. And that's the way that we see so many people come into being active using Strava. That's Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, coming to you from deep in the canyons,

high above the Pacific Ocean in Malibu. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. And you, my friends, are most welcome to join me today in a great conversation. I think it's a great conversation with Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath, who are the co-founders of Strava. So for those of you out there who are unfamiliar, Strava is a fitness social network that was designed specifically for athletes by athletes. As a matter of fact, Mark and Michael being standout multi-sport athletes in their own right.

And I love Strava. I was a very early adopter on this platform. I joined way back in 2008. I believe I was their 14,443rd member back when the platform was very, very cycling focused. But over time with the advent and the growth of both mobile and GPS technology, Strava Scope has really expanded to now serve athletes and fitness

enthusiasts of all kinds. And it's great. I love sharing my workouts on Strava, being held accountable by my community there, staying clued in to what my friends and other athletes are doing. And I think what stands out about Strava, what really distinguishes it from fellow social media platforms is its positivity. It's encouraging nature. It's community-oriented nature because it's essentially free from all of the negativity and the toxicity that tarnishes the feeds and comment sections of many, if not most of the other social sharing

sites. And so a couple of years ago, as some of you guys might recall, when I decided to train for the swim run world championships, Otillo, after taking a bunch of years off from competing, I decided that I was going to share every single workout that I put in on Strava to hold myself accountable primarily, to leverage the opportunity to kind of demonstrate what would be required as a 50-year-old man to compete in a race like this, to be essentially transparent in my preparation and simply show the kind of work required to train for an ultra swim run event. And I gotta say, it was the funnest thing. The community on Strava, it's incredibly supportive and positive.

And it really did help me stay on point. And now, as I just announced the other week, I've just begun formal training for this ultra distance triathlon event that I'm gonna do in Qatar in November. And so I've decided to do it again, to transparently share every workout that I put in in this very long, arduous build to prepare for the kind of event I haven't done in about a decade,

which is kind of nerve wracking, but also kind of awesome. And all the more reason to storytell around this because this show is about growth. It's about pushing the outer limits of your comfort zone. It's about new ideas and it's about how we can all live better while also doing right by the planet. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment.

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And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. Mark Gainey, Michael Horvath. So these two guys meet on the crew team at Harvard back in the late 1980s, I believe. They become good friends. But after graduation, they go on different paths. Mark goes into venture capital. Michael becomes an economist and a professor. But those paths ultimately bring them back together in Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto in 1996. And while still in their 20s, they get together, they launched their first startup,

Kana Communications. It's a massive success. And then in 2008, trying to figure out what to do now, they launched Strava, which is really born out of their shared love of fitness, their passion for sports. And it's grown into this thing, this must-have app for runners, cyclists, multi-sport athletes of all kinds. They've experienced tremendous growth over the years. But I think what really distinguishes Strava, among other things that I previously mentioned, is that Mark and Michael and their team have done an amazing job of maintaining the integrity of this platform that these two guys held at the company's inception. It's a great story. Today we tell it, and this is a conversation about a lot

of things. It's about tech, business, entrepreneurship. It's about sports. It's about sharing a love of the outdoors. But at its core, it's a conversation about community, how to create it, how to nurture it, and why it's so important. Quick note or disclaimer before we launch into the conversation. In the interest of total transparency, I have run ad campaigns for Strava on this podcast in the past. Obviously, this show was compensated for those ads, and I'd be happy to do reads for Strava in the future. However, I want to make it abundantly clear that this is not a sponsored podcast. I was not. I am not being compensated in any way for hosting Mark or Michael on the show,

nor am I paid to use Strava. I'm simply a fan of the platform. I have been, like I said, from the very beginning. Mark and Michael are two people I've always wanted to meet. Their story is super interesting and instructive. And so when the opportunity arose to host them, I jumped on it. So that's that. And that being said, let's do this. This is me and Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath.

So gentlemen, super excited to have you here. Thanks for doing this today. Exciting to be here. So exciting, impressive year. My first question for you is, if I open the Strava app right now and hit record, can we upload this as a verbal workout to the platform? Verbal and mental. Yeah. We're working hard. There should be a setting on the GPS watch for that, I think, in a static location.

I'm already sweating more. Yeah, heart rate, where our heart rate monitors, we're good to go. Get the KOM for conversation. That's right. I love Strava. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. And I think, you know, when I think about the platform

and, you know, why I love it so much and what attracts me to it is just the sheer positivity of the community. I mean, it seems like on the most fundamental level, like there's a wireframe, there's an architecture to it that isn't completely dissimilar from something like Facebook or even Twitter. You post and there's comments and there's a community. But it's so, by comparison to other platforms, so overwhelmingly uplifting and positive. So how did you cultivate that?

Is that by design or did that happen just by virtue of the target audience that you're going after? Or what do you attribute that to? I think it was definitely by its inception, we wanted to try to create that feeling of being part of a team, being connected to other people who share, whether it's your passion for what you're doing or a sense of just liking that camaraderie, liking being with each other. And so the first step in that is really just thinking through how do you get these people to interact about the right stuff

and not the wrong stuff. And I don't know that we nailed this day one. We used to drop you into your activities, not into the activities of other people. That was great for some of our audience. But for most people, what they want to know is they want to know there's a world out there that's, you know, these people are out there, they're not them.

They wanna focus on that. That's the source of their motivation. So I think it is by design. It's very much that sense of, before we even knew exactly what Strava was gonna be, it was gonna be about that sense of being on the team again, being part of a group of people again. Yeah, I remember my early, you know, initiation to the platform. I was a pretty early adopter.

It must've been, I don't know, maybe late 2008. How many numbers is your athlete ID? Oh, I don't know. I should look. I should know that. That's pretty much- Pretty early. I mean, I wasn't like one of the first people on the platform, but it was back in the days when you were very specifically targeting cyclists and in particular, like the hardcore cyclists, the data freaks. And it just seemed to magnetize that community as a place where everybody could kind of exchange not just data, but stories and community around the riding. So what was the thinking in going after that community first with the sense that you would later broaden it? It's one of the great ironies of Strava is that neither Michael or I are cyclists by background. We've done triathlons and we were runners. We met on the crew team,

so rowers and so forth. But if you fast forward to 2008, 2009, we saw an opportunity to go to market strategy, really. It was an opportunity where that audience you just described data-centric uh investing in the technology like the garmin devices on their on their handlebars and so forth and really no one was addressing it we were looking at those computers on on handlebars being treated like the old iron man timex watches right they'd start it they'd stop it and they'd delete so for, it was just an opportunity to go narrow and focused, know who we were talking to as an audience. But always with the strategy, if you go look at our earliest business plans, if we could get cyclists right, could we ultimately serve this global community of athletes?

Was there ever a sense that maybe you should go after running first? Because that's a much bigger, more kind of democratic community. Yeah, we definitely debated that in the beginning. But if you think about where runners were in 2007, 2008, as this is starting to take shape, GPS was not readily available in the phones, certainly not with that sense of longer battery life. So you're looking at some piece of hardware you're going to have to buy. And runners don't love to spend money. They love to buy their shoes and their shorts and that's it. And the cyclists are spending thousands of dollars on power meters. Yes. It's ridiculous. There goes a cyclist,

there goes another $20,000 bike and, you know, with know all its accessories and so i think it really was just looking at where the um where the adoption of the technology that drives what that makes strava strava is that you need to you need to be able to capture that workout in a way that allows the magic to come to life and that's gps uh so we waited the runners caught on you now you you see that right on the starting line of every half marathon, 10K, almost everyone's starting their watch or carrying their phone with them. Yeah, the bike is like this perfect machine for data mining where you can just extract so much information.

And before the seamlessness of the technology that we're so used to today, it was pretty wonky, you know, just really kind of on the horizon before you guys, you know, launched this thing where you could get this data, but, you know, I remember like trying to jerry-rig the devices and connect them to my computer. And I was using, I was exploring all different kinds of platforms.

Like at one moment when I was getting really into the data, I was using Golden Cheetah and you have to be like a PhD to understand those graphs, but you could just spend hours like getting into the nitty gritty of all of that. But to find a way to take the best of what something like that has to offer and make it palatable and accessible to the avid, but not completely geeked out athlete is no small feat.

Yeah, and if we go back to where the original idea for Strava came from, it was even more than a decade before. Can you imagine what it would have been like? We had this idea back in the 90s. I like to say we met last century. We rode on the crew team together. We graduated from the team

and kind of lost the lost uh connection to that sense of camaraderie and that's what we wanted to get back right away but in 1995-96 their gps was even further away from what you're talking about right the sense of like what what can you get out of out of that uh like collecting all the data and making it come to life in some way. So by the time we're rolling forward into the 21st century and we're looking at what the devices that are out there that are now being adopted by cyclists, we were like, oh, now the time is right.

We actually have something to work with. And I think we're gonna see that continue. I don't think we're done yet in terms of seeing what kind of data we can- Yeah, well, this whole quantified self-movement just continues to explode like a mushroom cloud. But, I mean, timing was perfect for you guys. You were right at the epicenter of when GPS technology became readily available. And the seamlessness of mobile then coming online really seemed to work perfectly with, you know, what you're trying to

build. The earliest days you had to have a Garmin device and you had to plug it into your computer and you had no idea. Trust me, I know. Yeah. We bought, we still have a funny, we were looking the other day, I think we spent something like $52,000 with Costco just to buy all the Garmin 350s that they had on stock in order to give them away to our friends. So we remember those early days, but you're right. We caught a fascinating wave where that technology between battery life and GPS sensitivity in the smartphones really turned a corner.

Right, yeah, you'd have to plug your device in and whether or not you could actually get the file to upload properly was anybody's guess. There's still some issues with that. Like some of these watches, they just don't quite have the seamlessness that I think they should at this point. But when the mobile technology became so profligate and the battery life, like you said, you could just use the app on the phone itself to track it. You didn't even need one of these devices. Correct.

You see, that's a really big area for us in terms of getting new athletes to come onto the platform, start using Strava. They already have the device in their pocket to get started. All they have to do is download Strava downloads for free. You get started. You have the experience of connecting to a community you knew was out there.

You just didn't know how to reach them. And then a pretty common path is you go from there to wanting more. And then you start thinking, well, what else can I do? Oh, there's this watch that looks like it'd be the perfect thing for me for what I do. Or there's this device that would add to my experience.

And so that upgrade path to the device experience is definitely, we see lots and lots of people do that. And not having to plug your watch in now anymore for it to just work through Bluetooth. Yeah, seamless. Is huge. Well, my own personal history with Strava, so it was my friend, Stu Bone,

who was a cycling buddy of mine, who's a longtime friend of Strava. You guys know Stu, right? Yeah, that's that really, if you know Stu Bone, you're part of the early crowd. Yeah, so he was the guy, because he would be like, you gotta get on Strava. I know that he knew you guys

and I was riding with him quite a bit. In fact, that was back when Stu was living out of an Airstream. If you know Stu, I don't know if you know about this chapter of his life, but he would come here and he would park his Airstream here for a weekend or a week or a month and kind of like live with us.

And I would ride with him quite a bit. So he's the one who initially tipped me on to Strava and I got on it. And again, this was back when it was just hardcore cyclists. And I was training at that time, mostly by myself, but on and off with a couple of the riders around here, Ben Bostrom, Eric Bostrom, occasionally with Dave Zabriskie and like Tim Johnson was around here, Ben Bostrom, Eric Bostrom, occasionally with Dave Zabriskie and like Tim

Johnson was around here. And when segments became a thing, it was kind of amazing how quickly it just became this communal competition to knock off these KOMs. And these guys would go at it. I remember there was an early outside magazine story where it was Ben and Dave and a couple of those other guys were always vying to get the KOM on Latigo, which is one of the great climbs around here. And I'm not nearly, you know, the elite athlete that those guys are. Like I can't, you know, I can't even stay in their tailwind, but I would find myself out on the climbs. And even when my coach would give me a certain workout, like, okay, you got to stay in zone two, cap that heart rate at, you know, 130 or whatever.

Every time I hit a climb in the back of my mind, I'm like, how's this going to look on Strava? And I, it would just play games with me. And I was so focused on these very specific races that I was training for and being as adherent as I could to my coach's program that I had to then get off Strava because it was screwing with me too much. And I would just always go over my limit all the time because I was so caught up in my ego and how this would look.

And it wasn't until I turned 52 years ago and I hadn't raced for a number of years and I decided I wanted to do this race, Otillo, the swim run world championships. And I thought this is a great opportunity to share the whole process of preparing for a race like this over a course of a year. So I got back on Strava after taking an extended hiatus and just decided like, I'm gonna show everybody what it's like to be 50 and train for a race like this.

I'm gonna share it, every single workout on Strava, the lows, the highs, everything. And using that in conjunction with Instagram, specifically Instagram stories was a really beautiful experience for me, but also for, you know, this growing community of people. I was amazed that anybody would be interested, but it was really cool. And it was so supportive and it really held me accountable and put a lot of wind in my sails. And I just loved every aspect of that. And I've just been using it ever since

for every single workout. So thank you for that. Thank you, thanks for being a member. But I would imagine, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember in those early days, this seems like it's changed, but you know, what's so great is that you can follow these elite athletes that you revere and respect and admire, and you can like see what they're doing. Like everyone from Killian Jornet to Lance Armstrong and all, you know, Taylor Finney,

all these amazing people. And in the early days, sometimes they would mask their power diet, you know, like they didn't want everyone to know exactly what was going on, but that seems to, that veil seems to be lifted. And now people feel pretty free into sharing everything, knowing like, listen, I can show you this, but you're not gonna actually go do it or whatever. I mean, maybe some of the elite Tour de France guys, but for the most part,

there seems to be an openness to sharing that in the early days people were private about it or, you know, and that seemed to have let go. Is that something you guys have noticed as well? Absolutely, yeah. I think maybe a sense of it's the data, those kinds of aspects of the data are maybe a little less precious. That's not really where the secret is anymore.

Largely everyone's got their own way of training and they think it's the right way for them and otherwise they'd be doing something differently. So the power is the power. Like that's what it is. And so I think when you look at something like the Peloton and the Tour de France, it's what we hear from the folks who are uploading Strava is like, well, there's the GCs out there.

They're battling it out for the trophy. But we're back here just trying to have a really great event. And Strava makes that come to life for us. For us, Strava is the event. And we like that aspect that we can still feel really great about the day because we battle it out for the KOM on that climb, or we got to compare something around each other because we're not the ones who are going to be hitting the headlines in the papers. And so that aspect of it does bring back sort of what Strava is. At the core, it's a sense of friendly competition, camaraderie through seeing what you're capable of.

And when you describe your own story about maybe finding that that was a little too intense and then stepping away for a while and coming back and then realizing there's this whole other side of Strava that actually has nothing to do with being at the top of the leaderboard. It's about telling your story as an athlete, the richness of the experience. And, you know, whether it's with photos or it's how you title your activity or it's the comments that you add to it that bring it to life. And people find that extremely motivating. And that part of it is what makes it rich for the people following you. Yeah, and you can create your own challenges around it using the platform as a vehicle,

like what Phil Gaiman is doing with getting going all over the world. World's worst. Yeah, yeah, I know. I've had him on the show talking about that too. You know, all the Strava art that people are doing, proposing to their partners using Strava art. And my favorite, my most recent favorite is what Ricky Gates did

in San Francisco, like running every street, which is incredible. How did he even do that? Like keep track of that? Yeah. Well, I think he was working with our team to try to make it come to life. So we had a little extra secret computing there going on. But when I think about sort of the platform is actually pretty simple. The only way you can contribute something is largely by uploading an activity. We do allow you. You can create a verbal post as well. But the predominant mode of contributing something is pretty constrained. Go do something outside or indoors.

Strava is for every sport, indoor, outdoor. And we want people to know that. That's it's really we want to be before any way you want to be active and sweat. That's what we're for. But that's the way you participate on the platform. And so that aspect of it is by constraining in that way, I think it turns the creativity. Now, how do I use this to be as creative as possible, given what I'm doing, or discover that something that's really new that I had never done before,

that's in my backyard because I see somebody else doing it. And so when I see that every street in San Francisco, I was like, wow, I bet I could do like maybe that corner of it right here in my backyard. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, with all the discussions around, I mean, these ultra races just get longer and longer and crazier and crazier. And then here's Ricky, who's just like, look, just use your backyard. You can create your own incredible experience, like, and at the same time, connect with your community in a really tactile way,

which is pretty cool. That's right. Well, you guys have had a really amazing entrepreneurial journey to this point. So I'm interested in that story. Like, let's take it back to the Cambridge days. Cambridge days. I know.

I'm the youngster here. Yeah. So, yeah, you're right. We met back in 1988. So as Michael said, last century. I grew up in Reno, Nevada and ended up, I was recruited to run at Harvard. And I got a little lucky. I grew up in Reno, Nevada and ended up, I was recruited to run at Harvard. And I got a little lucky once I got out there,

I was recruited by the crew coaches and made that transition. And that's where I met Michael was in that boathouse. So you went to Harvard in 86 then? Exactly. 86, right. Yeah, I graduated, exactly. Graduated from high school in 86, started the fall of 86. Right, and went in as a runner. And then what happened?

So I went in, ironically that fall I had stress fractures, so I wasn't able to run. And a very long story short, got introduced to somebody who was doing the sort of what we called the freshman program. This is now my sophomore year in the crew program and went down to the boathouse to see what it was all about and happened to run into the varsity coach at the time, a gentleman named Charlie Butt, who still runs the whole program today, almost 30 years later. And he said, what's your background?

Looked at me and, you know, kind of a tall, skinny kid with some big lungs and said, why are you here? And I said, yeah, I'm supposed to be in track and cross country, but I've been injured. And he said, well, why don't you try this thing called rowing? And yeah, one thing led to another. My degree today should say crew, because that's where I spent the rest of my time. Well, I was almost your classmate.

I graduated high school in 85 and almost went to Harvard. Is that right? Yeah, to swim actually for Joe Bernal at the time. I don't know if you knew any of the swimmers. But there's something about that transition from like running or swimming into crew. It seems to be like a natural, people who know how to suffer.

Yeah, I think that's right. And rowing is really a highly individual sport at one level you train as hard as you can to make the best boat you can get into the first boat second boat and and then as a team you you try as hard as possible to beat the other team's boat right in that same category and um that was one thing that i that really resonated with me is just that ability to to i played I played soccer growing up I've been on the sailing team tennis different things where there there is this aspect of you know just the the combination of team and individual and I found rowing to be this great

great sport for for being as intense as possible at an individual level and then and then being as as intense as possible as a group right um at the same time and my experience was similar to mark's except i didn't have the uh i didn't know what i had inside me at the time when i when i started i had um uh done some running and done you know done some um um sports like as i said soccer basketball but i never found myself as i never thought of myself as an athlete so walking into the boathouse what first drew me in was just the sense of camaraderie that was there um and that sense that the people who were were uh showing up never having rode before also were willing to give it a try and i i thought um so so am i i'm willing to give it a

try i'm willing to see what this is like after two or three weeks. I can decide then whether it's for me or not. But I'd say by the third day, I was completely hooked. This idea of just showing up, getting in a boat, getting out onto the river. All the other cares in your life fade away for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. And you're just with those group of people that that experience is something you share with those individuals. That was really powerful for me. Yeah, it's the, you know, the difference between

cycling, swimming or running is that you have to work as a unit. There's a real teamwork aspect to it that you don't find in other endurance sports. It's huge. Yeah, so you were a couple years senior, right? We span here, I started college in 1984. So when I met Mark, I was a senior, he was a sophomore,

but I stuck around in Cambridge for a couple years after graduating and worked in a job that allowed me to help coach the freshmen program at Harvard. And so Mark and I would interact at the boathouse and just became really good friends before we both left Cambridge in 1990. And that aspect of it also is like, we never rode in the same boat together.

So though we've been business partners now and friends for over 30 years, that experience was really unique to each of us in the sense of what we experienced at the boathouse. And so that says something about how common that, the commonality between the experiences. We weren't actually in the same boat. We weren't really on the same team overlapping.

He was on the freshman program when I was a senior, so we weren't even coached at the same time by the same coach. So, but yeah, we come away from it with the same experiences, the same sense of talking about it from what it shaped for us and what it ultimately led to in terms of Strava's creation. So, Michael, what was it that you saw in Mark or vice versa? Like why did you guys bond?

Like what is the genesis of this lifelong relationship that you guys have had? Well, I can actually point to one specific day where this is now fall of 89. I think Mark, you were injured or I can't remember. You couldn't row against Yale and Princeton, which are HYPs. It's called the Harvard-Yale-Princeton race. It's a three-way regatta.

We're just before the end of the season. This year, the race was down in Princeton in New Jersey. And so I said, Mark, let's get in the car let's drive down there see the race and you know we hop in my i had the jeep cj5 um with a soft top and it was pouring rain and probably freezing cold i remember just being so like incredibly cold but drove all the way down in new jersey uh watched the watchedatta, uh, watched the races and then drove back same day. And that was, that was really formative. I think in terms of our friendship, um, we, we probably had spent more time in that car that day than we had spent together previous to that.

Um, and I came away from that just both also just recognizing how important was it was for both of us to get down there and watch the race. And then, um just uh just that sense of um realizing i found somebody who i was really compatible with a few more yeah yeah it's it's hard to describe unless you've been there and having been a varsity athlete i know you know this rich the i mean the esprit de corps inside that boathouse and where i was fortunate was to have not only michael but a handful of his classmates who were two years older who really took me under their wing because I was a novice in that boathouse. I'd not held an oar before and so forth. And so to start with that friendship and experience that esprit de corps, part of it is just, it's the trash talking. It's the competition. It's all those things that you

just end up constantly obsessing over. That's why I say my degree should say crew because that is where I spent my time both mentally and physically. And so for us, the challenge was we graduated and poof, that sort of disappeared. So in many ways, I think the friendship was born, one, out of just a necessity to still want to hold on to this great thing that we had. And this group of friends and Michael was the closest that I had there to that. I think the other thing too about the two of us is that there's a really great yin and yang. I mean, he's underplaying,

he went off and got his PhD in economics and is just an amazing person from how he thinks and the way he applies, looks at problems and apply solutions to them. And I'm not that. I was art history. I was coming at things in a much more sort of maybe intuitive or sort of, I'm not sure how to describe it. It's just not smart the way that Michael's, not in an educated way.

But that yin and yang has worked well for us, whether it's in a friendship, whether it's in other kinds of relationships or, and as it proved out pretty well in businesses. Yeah. And in this stroke of fortune, you guys, after Harvard, you both end up like in Palo Alto, right? At the same time. You're teaching at Stanford. Yeah. Teaching economics. Right.

So Mark mentioned I decided to get a PhD in economics. That was after working for a couple of years. And my first job out of grad school was on the faculty at Stanford. I arrived in the summer of 1994. And for any of your listeners who are over the age of maybe 45, they understand what that means. The world just shifted all of a sudden. The internet was born. The consumer internet was something that... I sent one email

before I graduated with my PhD and then I arrive at Stanford and the IT person in the department comes in and says, I'm going to install a browser on your computer now. I said, what's a browser? And he said, you haven't heard of Mosaic? Because that was this free software you could get that would surf the web. So I had no idea what you're talking about. And then Mark was in Palo Alto working at a venture capital firm.

And if they had internet at all, it was dial-up internet. And I was at a university which had great bandwidth for the time. So he would come to my office, I think partly because how do you even access this thing called internet if you don't have an internet connection? You didn't have it at home for sure. And so he'd come to my office and we would spend some time just trying to explore, what is this thing? What is going on here? And those early days of just interacting around this completely new world led to some talking about, what could we do with this? What would, Mark's job, day job, was calling up entrepreneurs and talking to them about their ideas and what they had started.

And I was, not that I had a free time, but I was also in this space where, as an academic, your kind of job is to think and be creative, a lot like an entrepreneur. And I was trying to understand what this whole new world was as well. So that's where some of the early thinking around, well, could we really create a company doing something with the internet? What would that be? And actually, the first thing we thought of was, how do you create the virtual team? How do you make it possible to interact around your workouts with people? And Mark, you were at TA, so that's right.

Yeah. I interviewed for a job there. Did you really? I didn't get it, yeah. I don't know how I got mine. I just remember when I read that in your bio, I was like, oh my goodness, T.A. I remember there was a guy who worked there

whose name escapes me. Sean Murphy. Oh, I know Sean Murphy. He was a big swimmer, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sean is actually the reason that I got an interview there, I think. Sean was a teammate of mine.

Okay. But I remember the guy who, I don't know if he was a partner there, but the person who I interviewed with wore this full length leather coat and he just looked very slick and cool. Just seemed like this seemed like a cool place to work. And it was an office like right off University Avenue,

right? Yeah, I remember that. And I also remember summer of 94 in Palo Alto was World Cup. Did you move there during that insanity? Crazy. I was trying to study for the bar there when that was going Cup. Did you move there during that insanity? Crazy. I was trying to study for the bar there when that was going on and that did not go well. No, the Brazilians came to town.

Yeah, but TA was, to my recollection, kind of one of the early venture funds before venture capital became like a thing. Like they were like an early mover in that space. You know, they'd been around, the firm's been around since 68. So been around a long time, Boston based kind of blue blood firm. But you know, their unique quality was that they had a very specific kind of company that they would target, which is why I had a job as a kid coming out of college. They looked for bootstrapped, entrepreneurially owned, profitable,

growing businesses. So rather than reading business plans and so forth, they actually had folks like me calling entrepreneurs all day long, all over the country. I'd walk in on a Monday morning and have a stack of newspapers on my desk from Denver and Dubuque, Iowa and Arizona and so forth. And I'd look for want ads. I'd look to see who's hiring in that city and then I'd call on them. So for me, it was just this great, it's a little bit like going to business school. I got paid to talk to entrepreneurs all day long and I caught the bug to be an entrepreneur. It gave you that sense of possibility. Oh, it was so many great lessons, great mentors there, both on the entrepreneur side and the

investment side. But ultimately new investing wasn't for me. And so I left. I left in late 95 to go do something. Actually, you probably remember, I went to go work at Metro Sport, if you remember the old running store. Yes. I went from working at TA Associates and Venture Capital

to selling shoes for $8 an hour. With the idea being that you were going to figure out some kind of entrepreneurial play? I needed a job that I wouldn't feel guilty working on my, you know, moonlighting with my own thing. TA was an intense job. I mean, it required your full-time attention. I could go work at MetraSport for six hours or whatever it was, hang out with some good friends. I still have great friends from my MetraSport days, but once I punched the clock, I could go work on my startup, whatever that was going to be. And so how did you guys come up with this first company that you

started? So Michael hit the nail on the head. Our very first business plan was called Kana Sports. Kana was the name of my dog at the time, and it was the virtual locker room. We really did want to go recreate this experience we had at Newell Boathouse, but use the internet to do it. So in many ways it was Strava 1.0. And this was in 1995. We still have the business plan today. The irony was, a very long story short, in trying to figure out how to make that a business, we got introduced to a bunch of other sporting goods companies that were trying to build their own internet presence. And we identified a different problem, which was talking to their customers via email, which was something totally foreign and new to these companies. Take a Nike or a Trek bicycle or a Mizuno. They all had web

presence, but they'd never built any infrastructure to deal directly with the consumer. They had retailers to do it. So for the first time, they were getting these emails from consumers asking them about sizes and shapes and colors and so forth. And they were just letting those emails drop. And Michael and I looked at that and thought, well, that doesn't make any sense. Why do you spend millions of dollars building a website and not want to talk to your customer? At the same time, our virtual locker room had some fundamental business model challenges. We weren't quite sure how we were actually going to make money at it. And so we evolved the business, and that became Kana Communications doing customer email solutions for what we thought would just be the sporting goods industry. But it turned out that anybody putting up a website and trying to build a real business online needed these kinds of solutions.

Right. So essentially moving customer service from the phone to digital? That's correct. Yeah. But you're forgetting like the key part of here is which we take this idea for kind of sports, like, and we go and talk to some companies making websites and saying,

hey, could you build this for us? What we want is a place where people can come onto the site and interact with each other around their data, around their experience of being out there, riding their bikes and running, and talk to each other, kind of interact. And like a network, like a social network. And they're like, dude, that's nuts.

Nobody would do that. It's crazy. And all we have is HTML. We can't build this. And why don't you go solve a real problem and then they you know unfortunately they turned us away from building yeah i'm sure a lot of people say they had the idea for the first social network on on the internet but this is 1995 and we're talking about essentially the same things you described about what what you saw in

strava when you got on there uh that was in the original idea because that's really what we had experienced on the crew team. It wasn't just about, you know, the actual activities we did, the workouts we did. It was about that sense of going down and seeing what the workout was for the day and talking with your teammates about the workout. That's going to be hard or like, oh, I'm really glad we're doing that today. And then doing it and then talking about it afterwards. It was like the before, during, and after. And that's what we wanted to represent in some meaningful way through our KANA sports network. And that getting talked out of it because the technology was so far away was the best thing that ever happened. Honestly, if we started this in 95, it would have failed.

No one would have wanted to use this. There's no way to get data in. Yeah, the technology wasn't mature enough for it. No one would have wanted to use this. There's no way to get data in. Yeah, the technology wasn't mature enough for it. No, no, definitely not. But that sense of like, no, no, nobody wants to interact on the internet with each other. Go build this piece of boring software for companies to help them handle their emails from customers. That's what we ended up doing. But Kana becomes a huge thing, right? It becomes this massive company. Such a great, you talked earlier about so much of it is timing and catching certain waves. You talked about the quantified self and social

networks, what happened with Strava. The same thing was true with Kana. We were very fortunate, this combination of both the excitement to go build a business online, where we saw both new companies, the Ebays and the Yahoos doing, but also very traditional companies, the Ford Motor companies and the Chase. Everybody was trying to figure out how they were going to build a presence on the internet. And simultaneously, you had this fascination with customer service.

CRM was the acronym that everybody loved to use, customer relationship management. And so we just happened to be sort of at the apex of those waves that were crashing. And I love to look back at Con. I mean, we got to do in four or five years what many people try to do in four or five years what many people try to do in a lifetime of a career. We went from two guys and a dog hanging out in a very

small little shack just off the Stanford campus there to, you know, when I left in the summer of 2000, we were 1,200 people and a couple hundred million in revenue and publicly traded. And yeah, it was a really fun experience. Caught the bug. Early IPO success, right? Internet, not 1.0, but pre 2.0, I guess. Definitely. Yeah.

And then in the wake of that massive success, I guess I'm projecting a little bit, but the technology has caught up enough where suddenly the original idea behind KANA seems like it might be possible to move forward. Yes, there's a period in there between 2000 and 2006, 2007, where there's a whole bunch of other things going on in our life. where there's a whole bunch of other things going on in our life, probably not necessarily related to the technology evolution that you're describing, but just sort of what it is to be living and raising families and all the ins and outs that come with that. But we were always in touch. We were always, even though Michael now moved to the East Coast

and was raising his family in the East Coast and I was still in California, constantly brainstorming ideas. Frankly, the both of us were sitting on way too many boards. And I always joke, it's a bit like eating junk food. It's just tastes really good in the moment, but not terribly satisfying long-term. And so you're right. We got to that 2006, 2007 timeframe and said, we're too young. There's got to be something we can go do again. And that's when we dusted off the plan. Looked at other things as well, but ultimately it was Strava that surfaced

as something that we really wanted to try build. Right. And GPS technology has kind of matured to a certain point where it seems like this is possible. Yeah, I would even say that we launched Strava into a pretty crowded space already of companies trying to do something very similar, record your workout and get some feedback from that experience, that data you're collecting. And what was unique about Strava, I'd say we recognized that we wanted to build that social element, that sense of community was front and center in the experience as opposed to something that you might dabble in once in a while.

It was really the way you use Strava was to connect to a community. And I think the other part that was it was a piece of magic that we were fortunate enough to meet an individual named Davis Kitchell in living just across the river from Hanover, New Hampshire, where I was based. I was living in Hanover, New Hampshire, and he lives in Norwich across the river from Hanover, New Hampshire, where I was based. I was living in Hanover, New Hampshire, and he lives in Norwich across the river. And on my 20th, sorry, on December 20th, 2006, I turned 40, and that's the first time I met Davey. And he's telling me about, he's been dabbling with, how can you use GPS to track?

In his case, he was interested in tracking rowing workouts he was a rower in college went to Dartmouth and he was thinking this might also be something that could be used for for cycling for comparing on rowing as you're rowing on a river you don't know whether you went faster today on the same stretch than yesterday he's like oh could you use gps to sort of compare your times on the same stretch of river or the same stretch of road? What he's describing essentially is what's now known as Strava segments. He's the inventor of segments and holds the patents for it. And well, Strava holds it in his name. But that fortune of being able to meet the person who held part of the magic of what made Strava come to life gave it a heartbeat.

part of the magic of what made Strava come to life, gave it a heartbeat. And that's, I think, where you can make all the plans and do all the thinking, but sometimes you just have to have a spark that comes from the universe. I mean, that was the real differentiator from the get-go, right? Because at the time, I mean, who were the players?

Like Nike Plus, where they were around at that point, right? And what else was it? Like Run Keeper, map my ride, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Which were all like kind of wonky. Some of them are still around too. Nike Plus is still doing its thing,

but you were able to very quickly outpace all of these. Took a different path. By being very focused on that cycling community early, I think we were able to meet some needs that just weren't addressed in the marketplace. And that delivered on that, almost that addiction, or at least that fanaticism that we've seen in our community. And it feels like,

I'm interested in your experience with this, but it feels like it was a word of mouth thing. Like if you're a cyclist and you're in the, like I found out from Stu and, you know, then I, you know, it was just, it was just something that we, that, because cyclists talk, they ride in packs, you know, for the most part. There is a community aspect of it that probably isn't too dissimilar from rowing, even though it's individuated. But it was just the chatting amongst other riders that kind of made it catch fire. That's right.

I think that's where I tell people that Strava really spreads by word of mouth. We have lots of great people in our marketing team and our growth team helping us grow faster. But what they're trying to accentuate is how can we help people tell their story about Strava to their friends? And it is something when that comes to life for you, the first time you use it, the second time you use Strava, you say, well, this is really unique and different different I'm going to tell people I know who might like this and that's that's a really powerful tool powerful way to way to grow I think that's that's really where the early version of Strava the earliest versions of Strava we didn't necessarily know that that's what we had stumbled upon or that we that we had had brought to life but once we

started to hear the stories people would tell us and how, in a sense, it kept them coming back for more. Once you connect with others and you have that experience of being in that community and whether you're comparing your times on Strava segments or you're simply just seeing people's photos and getting motivated through that, you want to do it more. You want to get out there and do your own activities and you want to receive that sense of motivation from others. And then you see what other people are doing

and then you get that motivation again. So it's a flywheel effect. And then you tell your friends more. You talk to people about what you use. And if Strava is a meaningful part of your athletic life, you're gonna tell your friends about it. I remember, I think the first sense that I had that this thing was really blowing up was maybe late 2008

or sometime in 2009, perhaps. There was this thing called the Santa Monica Mountains Challenge out here, where the idea was over a 30-day period, you ride every climb in this, I guess it's a mountain range, sort of a mountain range out here. And I don't know how many climbs there were, maybe 20 or 30 or something like that.

And whoever had the fastest cumulative time over all of these climbs would win at the end of this 30-day period. And every hardcore rider in this area was after it. And it got so competitive that to my memory, some of the riders were waiting, like they would track and see what the times were and they'd wait till the very last day to go out and do it so that they would clip it. And then there wouldn't be time enough for somebody else to go and grab it. And

I was like, wow, these people are spending an unbelievable amount of time and energy on this challenge that just, I don't know who created it, but it was community created, I suspect. And then there was a party when this whole thing completed at Franco Bikes, which is a local bike company out here that I've worked with over the years. And all the riders came and it was this big party. And I was like, wow, this is like really something. And it really did merge the digital with the analog by bringing people together in a real world setting, which was really cool. We've got a fun, it's not a story that we tell often, but if you go back to our earliest, Davey Kitchell, Michael mentioned earlier, the inventor of segments, he created something we called the Green Machine. It was the very first website that we had. This was summer of 2008 and we put 10 people on the system. So that's it.

We had 10 customers. We had five on the West Coast and five on the East Coast. And we just wanted to see what would happen if we used a 30-day period, happened to be during the tour, during the Tour de France in July of 2008. Let's let those five from each coast sort of compete against each other and create some virtual competition, just the way you were describing in the Santa Monica challenge. And the behavior we watched over that 30 day period was absolutely what sold us in the fact that there's a business here. Um, the trash talking, the competitive strategy that would go into sort of, as you were just describing sort of, okay,

we need to pick a specific course to try to hit a 5K time or whatever the preem was for the day, we'd give certain awards each day. But it really opened our eyes to, A, how social cycling actually is and just the way in which these workouts, when they're brought together or sort of you're allowed to compare and contrast them, brings a whole other motivation to the story. And you could have people

in totally different parts of the world having a common experience through Strava. And so that's what we see today of 38 million athletes around the world from, I don't know, 165 plus countries. And the level of interactivity, I think it's something like over 3 billion kudos a year

are given between these athletes. So you do the math and you're like, wow, these people are really interacting around being active. And that, that's what that was. We saw in the first, uh, you know, that first summer, uh, we heard stories like, uh, you know, some of the people now joined our company. They, they, Mark Shaw and Chris Donahue were part of the original 10 and they decided, Hey, if you guys are really, cause they were part of, of the KANA, uh, software, uh, days, if you guys are really, because they were part of the KANA software days.

They were employees seven and eight, I think, at KANA. So they knew us really well. And we've worked together right now for many, many years. They said, if you guys are serious about this, man, because yesterday I called in sick to work so I could go out and ride my bike. It's like, oh, wow, we are changing behavior. That's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were onto that, I had found something really unique. Yeah, the positive encouragement, but also that kind of negative pressure. Like if I don't show up and post, like people are gonna know and I'm gonna catch wind for it. But even the earliest sort of thinking around this

is we're trying to get people to put down their phone, close their screen and get out there and be active, right? So yes, you do come back to those, those, uh, those, uh, surfaces to go and have the experience, but you can't really participate there if you haven't been out there doing, doing whatever it is that makes you, uh, that fuels you. Right. So that test case experience, was that when it like locked in for you? Like, Hey, this is real. Like we're going to be able to scale this and create a business around it.

Definitely. Yeah. I think if we're honest, we wouldn't have predicted the size and scope and scale that we see today. Michael and I were, we probably would have been happy if 10 or 20 of us were having a great time.

It was keeping us active. Again, that was the mission. The mission in many respects is how do I rebuild that team that I had back in the late 80s and early 90s? How do I stay motivated? And Michael and I have been very fortunate in our life. It wasn't like we needed to go build another public company. It was we know how important being active is to us, to our families, to everybody else. How do we keep that motivation? So it was enough for us to say, let's invest in Strava. And if Strava ends up supporting 10 employees and a few hundred

rabid cycling fans, great. You fast forward 10 years, it took on a life of its own. Couldn't be more happy, but yeah, it's been a crazy ride. right. So 38 million people, some odd people on the platform now, you're onboarding like a million people a month or something like that. That's crazy. And you self-funded this thing for the first couple of years, right? We did. And the thinking there was just, well, number one, we wanted to see what form this would take. And we'd been part of plenty of examples of companies as board members or investors where you come in early not knowing where it's going to go. And it doesn't go to a place where you really wish you hadn't raised the money. Having other people's money changes the expectations around what success means.

And so we could see this, as Mark said, being an enterprise that was much smaller in scope and scale than it is today. And we would have been happy individually. So we didn't want to have other people along for the ride until we were sure what this was going to be. Things did change. I think some of the factors we're launching, mobile apps just exploded the growth. We reached around the world through the app stores and got a sense of what this could be and how big it could be. And then we looked at our own, how concentrated did we want

our assets into one company? And so we realized that to fuel the growth of the company, the best strategy would be to go find like-minded investors who shared our long run vision to come along and join us. And as two guys who are two for two, like wildly successful with these two companies, what did you learn from the experience of founding and building and growing Kana

that informed how you wanted to structure Strava to, you know, sort of position it for a long-term success. The lesson that I would point to was this notion of taking risk on what looks like too small a market early. So if you think about Kana, we were email customer service. Our first product did nothing other than when you get an email into your inbox as a customer service rep in a company, how can you respond? We didn't even have the way for someone to actually create an email in the KANA system. Literally, there had to be an inbound message that you could send an outbound response to. It was very narrow and very

focused. And we had lots of investors who turned us down because like, guys, you've built a feature, not a product. But we had customers that were hungry for that feature. So you fast forward to the Strava days, in many ways, the same thing applied, which was, look, we don't necessarily believe that cycling is going to be the end all game. That's not necessarily the mission, but if we can stay focused there and really address the needs of that market, what happens is you then find yourself as in a leadership position. It may be in a leadership position of what looks like still a small market, but now you have a voice and now you can begin to build off that success. And that gave us, I think, the strength of conviction to then open the platform to runners

and ultimately to a wide spectrum of athletes. I don't know that we would have had the confidence had we not seen it happen at KANA. Because KANA, again, what started as customer email response, by the time we were going public, we had an expansive solution that solved all kinds of marketing and customer support needs. But you had to grow into it. You couldn't do it from day one. Yeah. I think that's a really powerful lesson for anybody who's trying to, you know, people that are online trying to build an audience. They're so worried about growth and how many people are following them and all of that, rather than just making sure that they're taking care of the people who are already interested in what they're doing and making sure those people are happy. Like being super focused on that gives you a lot more credibility, I think,

and an insurance policy against, you know, growth long-term than anything else. I think that was super smart. And I remember in those early days when I would go out running and it was like, I don't think initially you could even upload a run, right? No, no. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was a ride. Trust me. Lots of runs. Lots of runs. Yeah. But then when the time was right, you're like, okay, let's just expand the aperture a teeny bit, a teeny bit more, a teeny bit more. And we took grief. We took grief from our cycling community when we, when we launched running. Now you're really selling out. We're selling out. You know what's happened.

But I think we've- Opinionated a bunch, that crew, from how high your socks are to, you know, whether your sunglasses can go in, you know, inside the helmet straps or outside. Like there's a lot of strongly held beliefs around these things and as a result i mean in the early days we our app we had a cycling app and a running app because we right we didn't think the cyclist would want to download an app that was

for everybody and likewise for the runners they're they're equally opinionated sometimes so uh that that was a learning lesson to expand into running. It didn't just mean making some small changes in the user experience and the athlete experience in the app. It was really building a whole new team of people who were passionate about run inside the company. Because you tell a cyclist, well, make it for runners. And they're like, well, we can leave it miles per hour, can't we? It's like, no, runners don't think about miles per hour. They think about minutes per mile. You've got to change that.

And they're like, why? That makes no sense. But believe me, it makes a huge difference when you have people in building the product that are passionate about the sport. So we had to build pretty much a separate team that could be really successful at thinking through the needs of the runner.

And then convince, as Mark said, convince our core audience that we weren't selling out. Right. We were trying to build something that they would ultimately love and would help fuel their motivation because they have friends who run and they do some amazing things.

And that's a source of motivation, even if you're spending all your time on a bike. Was the calculus to go after the elite runner community first in the sense that you wanted to go after the hardcore cyclist first, because running is so much more democratic and the population is so much more kind of diverse in terms of skill and acumen.

I think the way we've always thought about it is let's build for the most demanding athletes in the world. If we can- Yeah, like stress test it for them. Yeah, and it's not necessary, but with the acknowledgement that this needs to be easy and simple enough that everybody can use. It's a fine line.

I always joke, if Nike can figure out how to build a $250 shoe that's worn by the Olympic marathoner, and yet I have no problem walking to the store and buying it because I need that shoe as well. How do we do that at Strava? How do we make sure that what we have provides the kinds of features and services and so forth that someone who's at the elite level will be driven towards? But at the end of the day, the way you described some of the early other solutions out there that were really complex and hard to read and sort of navigate. This needs to be simple.

This needs to be, at the end of the day, we always used to say at Strava, if it's not fun and entertaining, we've missed the mark because that's fundamentally what keeps us motivated. Right, but to innovate at the highest level creates an aspirational brand, right? That then everybody wants to be a part of. Yeah, we used to talk about it in terms of

if athletes are oriented on a pyramid and the top part, the top third of the pyramid is this, you know, the persona that we're inventing Strava for and the bottom of people who maybe aren't really sure that they want to be active at all. They don't wake up thinking, how am I going to be active today? We were aiming for the top because that would pull in the middle. wake up thinking, how am I going to be active today? We were aiming for the top because that would pull in the middle. If we aim for the big part in the middle or even like some of our competitors did, aim for the person who doesn't even know that they're going to be active on a regular basis, we're never going to get the top third of the pyramid. And we don't create an aspirational brand that brings everybody in eventually. So it was starting at the top and eventually hoping that that would bring up everybody, bring everybody into the experience.

And I think that's, for most part, that's been the experience. And it's come along with some challenges for sure, which is one of the things we talk about is like, how do we use the word athlete? When a lot of people who use Strava don't identify with that term. They don't think of themselves as athletes.

And we define it as, if you sweat, you're an athlete. That's as simple as that. And so a lot of people will say,, you're an athlete. That's as simple as that. And so a lot of people will say, okay, I sweat. I guess Strava is for me. Let's give it a try. Yeah, and now I feel like the brand has transcended any of these specific disciplines. It's just like a,

the identification that an athlete has with Strava seems to be just, what's the right word I'm searching for? It is an aspirational brand. Like the brand awareness transcends cycling or running or triathlon or anything like that. I may not call, I wouldn't say it's a tattoo brand, but definitely a t-shirt brand. You'd wanna wear a Strava t-shirt or we used to sell those by the way that was

really pretty cool we should bring it back why are you doing that yeah um get the schwag out there uh but uh you know you want to wear the t-shirt or you want to once you're you're in for a while in the experience and you've been using it for a while you're like well this is the way i am an athlete now this is it's a generational brand like you can think about it for a while, you're like, well, this is the way I am an athlete now. This is, it's a generational brand. Like you can think about it as I'm going to, I'm not, I'm not just dabbling here. I'm going to be here for, for as long as I'm active. So I think that's, that's also another aspect that I think we were shooting for. And going back in the early days, when our experience had kind of taught us something else on the, you know, the, on the negative side, which is when you, when you think you think about success as being defined by either

liquidity or an exit, and you are building your company with sort of that as the ultimate goal, is to return to a carefree life where you never have to think about the company again. That's not a great company. That's a four-year stint to trying to win the gold medal. When you had that experience already. We did, and we didn't want that. We wanted something we could see ourselves involved in for decades.

And we said, 20, 30 years, we think we can be part of building this brand and company and experience and bringing it to as many people as possible around the world. And so we're here, we're 10 years in, and we're still, our roles have changed and morphed over the years, but we're still here, we're still building Strava and excited to do so. And I think that's as important as all the positives we learned from Kano,

was the negatives of just what happens when you lose sight of, hey, we're trying to build something really great and let's keep doing it as long as we possibly can. Have you had suitors along the way who've come down the pike offering to buy the company? Not at a number that would be interesting. Yeah, you're being cagey about that.

At some point, somebody will, I would imagine. And we'll be thoughtful and strategic. And we take all calls and have great conversations with lots of partners out there. But Michael hit the nail on the head. I'd look at it this way. You go back to KANA. We gave everybody who joined KANA two books. They got The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

And they got a book called Built to Last by Jim Collins. And it was a little bit of like the yin and yang of building a business. And we had unfinished business with Kana. We didn't do the built to last. Lots of great outcomes for investors, for employees, for customers. Kana is still used today out there. It's a great piece of software, but it wasn't the organization that we could hang our hats on for years. You fast forward to the summer of 2006, Michael and I sat down together in a little condo in Vail, Colorado to start brainstorming what's our next business going to be. And before we even started thinking about our business, we started thinking about other businesses that we admired. They weren't the condos of the world.

They were the Patagonias and the Oakleys or the Virgins and so forth, these great consumer brands. It sort of withstood the test of time, as you described, sort of aspirational brands. And so that's been a mission from day one here at Strava. I don't know. We've always got it right. We've got plenty of challenges. But this is one where I'd love to think that this far outlasts either of us and what we're doing. Well, the Oakley founder was a mentor of yours early on, right?

Jim Jannard. From the TA days? Yeah. Yeah, I was very fortunate. So what did you learn from him? Oh my goodness. He was a fascinating guy. I mean, some simple things.

You know, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you are going to live, eat, and breathe your business 24, seven, 365 days a year. And don't expect to make any money anytime soon. So you better love what you do. Uh, I don't know if anybody knows his story, but he started by selling motorcycle hand grips out of a Volkswagen van. I did not know that. Baja. Yeah. He was a dirt bikes and he saw the problem with a goggles coming in and so he developed a goggle so that'd be the second thing is you know again a very focused narrow approach to how he he went about his business um yeah i mean just just a great so much of it was not necessarily a specific lesson but an attitude uh just you you you grind and you you you keep going and you focus on quality.

I think sometimes we get lost in Silicon Valley. It's very much sort of up and to the right all the time. How fast are you growing and so forth? I'd like to think that at Strava, we still have this emphasis on just let's do it right. It may take us a little bit longer, but let's build that into the system. And I think at least the early days

of Oakley, we're now going back to the early nineties before his company was bought, but fantastic company. So you guys have run the gamut being in Silicon Valley, building two companies, and we're kind of in a period right now where there's a backlash against Silicon Valley and a healthy suspect when it comes to these social media platforms, it's all in the news and we all know these stories well. How do you kind of look at your fellow social network pioneers? Like what are they doing wrong?

What are they doing right? Like how can the community, the technology community do better to kind of solve some of the toxicity problems that we're seeing now? Well, so I don't know any of those. You guys don't all get together in a room? And so I don't want to speak about like what I think.

You're not all in the clubhouse together. I think there's a sense, you know, honestly, I think there's an idea that you guys are doing that. There is like this cabal that gets together. We're not invited. Yeah, there is one. We've never received the invitation. But rather than talk about what they're doing wrong,

I think what we're doing- As an observer. As an observer, maybe what we're focused on is, so we have core values at Strava. We call them the Strava ABCs. There's an A, there's a B, and there's three Cs. So the A is for authenticity, and B is for balance, and then there's camaraderie, commitment, and craftsmanship.

But I'm going to talk about authenticity and answer this one because I think what that says is linking what you say, what you do, and what your customer experiences are all have to be consistent. If that's not the case, then you're not authentic and your company is not authentic. Something about there, something in there is gone awry. And so at Strava, we set out to serve the athlete. On day one, when we said we're going to do this, that summer of 2008, when we clearly had something that people were resonating with, we said, this is it. We found the customer, if you will, the person who we want to serve is the person who wakes up every day saying, what am I going to do to be active today? And so we wanted Strava to be engaged in serving that person.

And so any idea that comes along, we, we start with the question, does it serve the athlete? If it doesn't, we're not going to do it. We're going to, we're going to say somebody else can do that idea. It's not, not for us. It's not, that's not part of the Strava world. And then we go on to other questions like, is it good for the business or does it serve some other, uh, you know, purpose? And, but the starting point is always, does it serve the athlete? So I think that's where good businesses have to have that, that linkage, that authenticity. And maybe that's where, if I do now look at outside and some of those stories I've read, just again, what I read in the papers, it's that I question whether there

is that link between what the company says they're doing, what they're actually doing, and then sort of how the customer, if you will, the user is, you know, therefore caught in the middle between the disparity between those two things. Yeah, Rich, I go back. An early statement that Michael and I had was, let's treat Strava as though it's a very important piece of gear for the cyclist. It's got to have high utility, but that's, we wanted our members to refer to Strava

as though it was as important as those new wheels that they just bought or their helmet or their shoe, whatever it happened to be for their sport. And by thinking through that model, you're then in a place where, as Michael refers to, this opportunity of, okay, so now we're serving the asset. We're very clear who our customer is. If you look at our business model today, the predominance of our revenue comes directly from our consumers. They pay for Summit, which is the premium version.

from our consumers. They pay for Summit, which is the premium version. So I think we've been fortunate in the sense that we've been able to maintain sort of that clarity and that authenticity he described, which then leads to another important word, which I don't, I think at least inside Strava, we've tried to maintain, which is transparency. We're going to make mistakes. Some of this stuff is new. We just could not have, we'll be the first to acknowledge, there's no way we could have predicted the ways in which people would want to use Strava in the ways that they have. And so our ability to be very transparent and understand that and to adjust, I think, has been an important part of sort of the growth for our business and I would argue for any of the others. Yeah, the way that users kind of take the platform and make it their own and start to tell you what it is is something that's out of the others. Yeah. The way that users kind of take the platform and make it their own and start to tell you what it is, is something that's out of your control. And I think the gestalt,

like the pace of these things happens so quickly that even the best intentioned people, it can spiral out of control. I mean, you look at Twitter and what Jack Dorsey is having to contend with right now, like these are really difficult problems. And I feel like he, he's been doing a little bit of a podcast tour lately. He's are really difficult problems. And I feel like he's been doing a little bit of a podcast tour lately. He's being really transparent about what they're doing right and the challenges they face

and what they haven't done right and how difficult it is to try to find solutions to these things. Or you take, you know, you look at Zuckerberg and the ways in which the platform is being co-opted for ulterior motives. That's a different sticky wicket. But you guys have really been able to remain clear of those kind of toxic forces because of the nature of,

I think, your user base, which is very different. But you're not without your controversy. I mean, you have this heat map thing. Like, can you walk me through what happened with that? want to grab that one or you want me to do it? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of press about this. I'll see how much I can get right, yeah. You know, I mean, you took, that's the only time I've ever seen you guys take any kind of heat, you know, and deservedly so. There's some things here and I'm just interested in, you know, what happened from your perspective.

So what you're referring to, a little over a year ago, there was a student, I believe he was out of Australia, who began putting up on Twitter very specific parts of our map. So when you refer to that heat map, we have this global map that shows all the public activities that people have posted around the world. And you can focus in to very specific areas anywhere in the world. And it's an amazing tool. It's an amazing thing to look at because you'll see uploads in 190 countries today. You'll see uploads on the South Pole. You'll see uploads. And you'll see uploads in places that are pretty extreme, for instance, war zones and so forth, where there's military bases.

This gentleman in Australia, a young student, was posting on Twitter some of the areas where he was identifying military outlets or military bases where you could see Strava uploads. People were working out on these bases. Now, I'll start by saying the good news was we've actually worked closely with certain governments and military organizations for years. And so thankfully, there wasn't anything that was being disclosed on Strava that somehow was illegal or was putting people in harm's way. But there was a perception out there that because we weren't openly talking about the way in which people were uploading, that somehow we were disclosing things we shouldn't. And that's where the uproar became, because it just took on a life of its own. You started to see headlines that Strava was outing military bases and things like that. So, and Michael, you can probably talk to the things that we've done to improve both our

communication on this and what it is to post a public activity and so forth. The heat map remains live. We update it on a very regular basis. It's a valuable tool. We work closely again with military and government to make sure that they're working with their folks and that there's rules in place so that people don't post and put anyone in harm's way.

But it was a good lesson for us in terms of the way in which perception becomes reality very quickly. Right. Yeah, my recollection was that military personnel were uploading to Strava, and they had their privacy settings set to public, basically, so that anybody could see this. And if these individuals happened to be on bases that were not publicly known, that that would create a potential security risk. Correct, although I believe the military has been very good at monitoring Strava and knows sort of-

Were they not doing that beforehand? Like people were doing this without tweaking their privacy settings or? This is where, and you may have- We were told, because in the wake of this um uh the media uh story here the media media event uh we we had lots of outreach to uh military not just the u.s but other countries as well and they assured us you you haven't strava has not revealed anything that the world didn't already know this is these aren't truly clandestine bases that no one ever knew existed. But the fact is that this isn't a Strava problem, it's a military

problem. We need to ensure that whether it's Strava or Twitter or any other social media that our soldiers, our active personnel in these places, they need to be conscious of what is public when they're posting to social media. And that goes across the board. A lot of different things. Yeah, if you're tweeting and you have your geolocator on, it's going to do the same thing, right? Sure. So there is a way in which we play into this, though,

which is what we did in the wake of this was to say, okay, so how do we assess how to make it more likely that someone's going to choose to do the right thing with their privacy settings, right? So we have taken a lot of steps to try to make it easier to understand how you set your privacy affects your user experience. Do you want to show up in leaderboards or don't you? Well, that affects what kind of experience you're going to have in Strava. Do you want to be able to be found in a search to be able to have your friends find you and be able to follow you and give you kudos and comments?

And all those things are hard to understand when you're first joining Strava and you don't really understand what they mean. And so, but we've done, we've taken steps to try to make that more clear so that people will choose the right set of the privacy settings that are right for them in their situation. I think that's the part that we take, you know, I think at this point, really good pride in the way in which we've built a much more consistent and unified flow in how you set your privacy settings. Because it's super important that people understand what they're getting themselves into

and depending on who and where they are. So today, Strava came out of that, I think, with some really important learnings and lessons and it triggered some changes. And I think we also, the world also, hopefully at this point, understands that we didn't out any soldiers in any secret also, the world also, hopefully at this point understands that we didn't out any soldiers

in any secret places that the world didn't know about. Yeah, that's good to know because I actually didn't know that. I thought there was some outing, some inadvertent outing there. Years earlier, we'd actually worked with NATO on a situation that was more like that where they just said,

we're uncomfortable with what's being disclosed. And we work with them too and their soldiers and places in the field so that that didn't show up on the heat. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, I see you guys as two people who had privacy considerations very early on

because from, I don't know if it was in version one, but pretty early on, you could I don't know if it was in version one, but pretty early on you could, you could mask your house and like create a perimeter so that people can figure out where, where you lived. I mean, that was very early in the app, right? Yeah. This goes back to this notion of first and foremost, high utility, let's make sure we're serving the athlete. And so you're exactly right. We, we thought through lots of different privacy scenarios and how can we create tools. Michael's right. I think if anything that came out of this heat map was, how do we simplify that? The challenge is, it really is an art. Michael's almost downplaying the, it's really funny to listen to our community because they'll often want both. They want extreme

privacy, but they want to be on that leaderboard. They want to know how they did against their friends. And it's like, you really can't have it both ways. If you're going to, we can give you the privacy or you can compete and have fun with your friends, but it's a really hard challenge to try to give you both. So you guys brought on a new CEO fairly recently, right? A guy who came over from Instagram. So what is the thinking there? And like, what is he bringing to the equation? Well, so this is also a good lesson. I think we've learned over the years

through a number of experiences, which is the needs of your company evolve. That includes the needs, you know, in terms of who you need in leadership positions, even up to who you need as your CEO. And the history of Strava, Mark and I had traded the CEO position between us by that point a couple of times.

And we both recognized that there were two factors. One was our own capacity and, you know and what we were able to sign up for was really limited for a number of factors. And the second thing was really that part about the evolution of the company. What the company needed was someone else besides the two of us running it. And the way I described it when the board, the board was trying to decide whether, you know, sort of how we were going to navigate this and we'd met James and we thought highly of him. James Quarles is our CEO.

I described it as like, Mark and I are the dads driving the minivan to the Grand Canyon and everyone is in the back seat and they all want to stop for water and they want to stop to take a picture. And we need someone to just drive the van. We need someone to get us there. And so maybe that's part of the realization is that James came in with a great set of experiences

that are really suited for where we were as a company. He understands the value of value of Strava is tied to the value we provide to the community. That's where the value of the company comes from. And I think he's done an extremely good job at leading us forward from that point, which is now it's almost two years in, actually. So really kudos to James and the ability, what he's been able to do to drive the success. and the ability, what he's been able to do to drive the success of the company. What kind of changes has he implemented or what sort of direction is he putting in place? I would start by saying just a renewed sense

of just the importance of growth for the company, the growth of saying, you know, there are plenty of more. I like to think about it as like 10% of the world's population wakes up every day saying, how do I want to be active? We've met 5% of those people. We got a long way to go. Yeah, 38 million is a lot,

but like there's a lot of people on the planet. Exactly. So it's like, let's be really conscious of how do we get Strava into the lives of more and more people because they can benefit from it. We think we make the world a better place by encouraging them to be more active. And that makes them translate into better partners and better colleagues and better parents because it fuels their own sense of

meaning in their day. So that's a renewed sense of growth, which I think is super important to invigorate the team inside the company as well as just in terms of our community so i i think that's that's one of the big contributions uh so far this year in his tenure he also just he brings a set of experiences four years facebook four years uh instagram before that and before either of those at Dell and so forth. Some of that large company experience is incredibly valuable, just understanding processes and scale inside the organization.

It's one thing in terms of growing our community, but it's also just how do we grow more effectively as a company? Perfect example, he did a phenomenal job within his first few months of really spearheading our move to open up, for all intents and purposes, almost a second headquarters in Denver. I mean, our headquarters is in San Francisco, but there's just tremendous energy for this office that we now have in Denver. And that was James. He drove that initiative from day one. He saw the strategic benefit of opening up that office and allowing us to begin hiring and building teams out there and

what that should look like and how to develop leadership there. And being one of the people who probably convinced Michael that moving from Hanover to Denver would be a good idea and things like that. But I just, I look to James as somebody who has an appreciation for what that next level of growth looks and feels like. And I'm happy to then take on the role I have. And what do you foresee as your biggest challenges to take that next step to grow? Like what are the things you're trying to overcome right now? Well, I'll say one, because we were talking about it earlier. I think it's always a challenge to remain authentic to your existing audience while you're continuing to try to expand the opportunity to a broader population. And so we were always looking to walk that fine line. How do you

remain that aspirational brand, but also how do you meet the needs of like our cycling community? You know, they're not to be forgotten. It's not as though that was what got us to here and now we're moving on. It's how do we serve them as well as we possibly can as we expand into other sports, but also just other categories of activity and experience. What are some of those other categories that you're wanting to capture and how would they be captured on the platform? Like if you're a football player or a basketball player or something like that, that doesn't lend itself naturally to... Yeah, we haven't touched the team sports today, but we've taken a lot of interest in what happens when people are indoors. So much of the world doesn't have the benefits that we have in California where we can train outdoors 12 months out of the year. A lot of folks have to go inside.

One of the best strategies we've had is to realize we can't do it alone. So we've had a great partnership strategy. We literally now have tens of thousands of API partners who work with us who maybe have developed a great indoor training app or something that allows them, you know, the examples I would use would be Zwift or Peloton. Right. Yeah. It integrates perfectly with Peloton. Just, you know, you go, you have your Peloton experience. They're awesome at what they do. And then when you're done, it gets uploaded to Strava so that you have that home for your athletic life. Strava is that one place where you can pull all your activities into one place. That's a great way for us to think about how we continue to expand,

but we do it as a platform with lots of partners. Yeah. And there's more and more of those app developers for a particular sport, for example, yoga or core strength. And they will use that API to get their users' activities to come up into Strava. But then it benefits them because through our feed, there's more awareness. Oh, there's a really cool app for yoga. I want to try that too because I do yoga. I didn't know you could add that to Strava. So it fuels everything that we want, which is we want

those partners to be successful. We want people to upload more of their active life onto Strava and interact with it, be able to contribute that to the community so they get the benefits of that, the motivation that comes from contributing that. And then Strava, I think ultimately we have not had to build the yoga app ourselves because that's a tall challenge. That would mean, again, building a parallel team that's really passionate about yoga. That's going to be challenging too for every single sport out there. Have you thought about developing like in-person analog experiences in the way that like Nike

has their run club and it's bringing people together in person, whether it's through like a pop-up or like a retail outlet for Strava that could be a community meeting place. There's a great example that's going on right now in London. And I have to admit, I'm just reading about it and catching up on it, but it's in partnership with New Balance. They've opened a pub serving beers. But the idea being that you go out and you run certain segments in that neighborhood and you sort of, in a sense, you earn segment awards that you can then go back and redeem for the local beer. That's pretty good. Points for creativity there.

Yeah. So it's bringing that run community together in that local area and so forth. It's a great way for us to brainstorm and experiment with partners and think about how we scale things together. We have a renewed effort on the United States this year where we've got a new team where marketing folks are really going in at a local level. In fact, I believe we just finished the – maybe you want to talk about this East West in LA. Oh yeah, yeah. I've noticed that. I see it in my feed, but I haven't like clicked or joined, but it's like East versus West, who can accumulate the most kilometers of running. An example of just being super local focused and really thinking about the platform as a way to

fuel people's motivation to be active in something that kind of maybe it's a little a little bit of a uh you know just sort of local to this this area but it's like yeah that makes sense i i'd like i'd like to be part of that team that's going out against that other team but really i'm doing it myself just going out to to go for a run yeah but it gives you that little extra layer and we used to talk about that with um with regard to like what strava is really doing is like you you spend 30 minutes, an hour, 90 minutes out being active. Strava magnifies that. Strava does something that makes it feel like either it was worth more or you got more out of it or you learned something more than you would

have if you hadn't used Strava. And so I think that's a good example where this is the platform coming to life in a local way. And it's not quite us putting on a race or an event where we say, now you have to show up at this point in this time and this day. It's separated a bit from those requirements of what we normally think of as a participation event. But it's every bit, hopefully every bit is motivating and fun and in some ways rewarding for you to participate in that way. But on a super mass level as opposed to a community oriented. Exactly. Yeah. Well, one of the developments that I've noticed is this move into becoming more of a content platform. Like about a year ago, you opened it up to allow athletes to post like little mini blogs and things like that. And now you guys out, you just launched a podcast recently, right? How dare you?

What were we thinking? I guess it comes from thinking about every activity is a story. And so Strava already is full of content, Strava. And it's how do we get some more of that content to come to life? I think there's a great TV show coming out of Strava at some point. No plans to do that now, but just thinking about in terms of what, you know, what you might want to turn on and watch for 15 or 20 minutes might be a stream of stuff that's coming from people's activities around the world and great photos and someday we'll add video, I promise. But that sense of like all the stuff, this athlete generated content is pretty rich.

And the best two or 3% of that content is amazing stuff. So how do you get that to life, bring that to life? And the podcast is a good example where we had some voices that were really, really rich and interesting and we saw their stories and we wanted to give them a platform. So I think it's really, at this point, still very much an experiment, which we do a lot of at Strava.

Our ethos is to try, keep what's good, hopefully respectfully discard what's bad, and that way learn how to serve the athlete better. But the podcast, I think, has been really well received. We've heard great feedback. We've heard great feedback. Maybe it's partly what people are interested in hearing is the stories about, specifically about sort of challenges you face that either you face because you're active as an athlete or things that by being active, you can overcome those challenges. And that's been the theme that we've been mining now. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, there are some really like amazing, notable stories that have come out.

You guys have done a good job of creating these beautiful blog posts out of some of those, like the guys that scaled Everest without oxygen, you know, a couple like beautiful long, you know, sort of more like immersive interactive blog posts that showed all the graphs and data and photographs from something like that. You know, Rich, I'd argue one of the best parts of being a founder here is that we're privileged enough to see the emails and the letters that come into Strava. So we can do those things that are curated like with Adrian and Everest and so forth.

But every week we'll get another story from a community member and the impact that Strava had. And that's what makes it worth it. That's the why. That's the why. I could bore you, but we could go on for the next two hours with just story after story. What's your favorite one? You know, Michael and I were talking about one on our drive up here. There was a great one.

Here's one. 47-year-old mountain biker down in Texas. Uh, happy as a clam on Strava. He's got his posse. They love to compete against each other. They go out every weekend training. There's just one thing that's bothering him, which is every time he looks at Strava, his heart rate was about 20 beats higher than all of his buddies. And it didn't make any sense to him why he would be faster and stronger and more fit, but why is his heart rate high? So again, a long story short, he ends up going to his primary care physician who tells him, ah, you've got an athlete's heart. Don't worry about it. Ends up

at a cardiologist because he still doesn't make sense. Cardiologist does some tests and it turns out he has what's called a widow maker. He's away from a, from a major heart attack. And so he ends up going in and having a triple bypass, uh, and writes to us because he was completely asymptomatic. He felt great. Uh, but this one thing kept nagging him on Strava. And it's not because we're in the business of showing him his heart rate. He was, we're in the business of entertaining. We're in the business of having him have fun with his buddies. But he was on it enough that this thing was giving him a signal and he was smart enough to go and have it checked out. And now he's back riding. This was a year or two ago, but when he rode to us, he was just back walking and starting back.

Yeah. The widow maker is the killer, man. It is. Takes a lot of lives. That's an amazing story. Yeah. So it's fun to know that we were there. Yeah. Cool. In this whole entrepreneurial journey that you guys have been on, I mean, obviously, you launch a startup, there's going to be a million obstacles and moments where you're going to want to quit and you think you're going to fail. What are some of those moments and how did you get through them? You

know, I'm just thinking, you know, as somebody who's listening to this, who's a startup entrepreneur or trying to start their own business, what are some of the principles and things that you've learned along the way for, you know, the fledgling entrepreneur out there? I mean, you talked about authenticity and the principles upon which you found at Strava, but one of the strongest lessons from Kana and from Strava, I think is that, that listen to your customers. If, if they are finding value in what you're doing, if they're, if they're seeing something and are responding you know, whether it's, they're telling their friends in the case of Strava or, or theyva or they're coming back and wanting us to do more for them in the case of Kana in terms of what kind of features we could build into the product, that's the biggest signal you have that you're onto something.

And don't listen to the investors. Don't listen to your own internal voice that says, well, this is a lot harder than you thought it would be. If your customers are saying, this is amazing, I'm really happy that I met you. I'm really happy I'm here. Then you're onto something. And I recall many, many dark days in both Kana and Strava where we're kind of searching for, is this really it? Is this, are we on the right path? And then we would get the signal from, you know, somebody writing in and saying, Strava is the best thing I ever, best app I ever used. Or it's now, I downloaded it yesterday. Now it's on my home screen on my phone.

And those kinds of signals were often the little boost we needed to say, OK, so yeah, this is a challenge right now. Maybe we can't hire the person we wanted to hire. They took another job. Or are we looking at how much money in the early days before we had raised capital like how much of our own money we're putting in the company wanting like okay so what's the run rate here how much can we uh how much longer can we keep going and that that was that was a really important thing for me that sense of the signal you can get from your customers yeah i'm gonna throw out a caveat because i know that we have 38 million customers listening right now.

So we are trying to listen. All 38 million of them are listening right now. They're listening right now to the Rich World podcast. And we are trying to listen to you, but when there's 38 million of you, we may not be able to actually solve every one of your problems. So I'm going to put that caveat out there. You take customer service seriously. But I also know there's a lot of folks who are very upset that we haven't got their feature quite right after two or three years. Right. What's the feature that everyone keeps bugging you?

Like with Twitter, it's like, can we edit the tweets? Like what's the one thing that everyone's bugging you to change? Great question. It's a long list. I'll list one that's just been truly contentious. We switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed. Like every social media platform when it reaches a certain point. Right.

I didn't even know that. And a couple of good reasons. We thought actually the biggest one is, again, going back to sort of how we think about things. We want to serve the athlete. And part of the challenge is if you have more than just a handful of followers, you may not have enough time to get through your whole feed. And so we want to make sure we're showing at least the stuff that you're probably going to be most interested in first. And then eventually you get through everything you haven't seen already. And in theory, that's the way the feed is constructed now with an algorithm that tries to rank what you could be looking at that you haven't already seen

and show you the highest rank stuff first. But boy, it's challenging for many people for a lot of reasons. And I think, Mark, you can speak to this. But can you toggle that? Can you go back to? Oh, yeah. Now you're like, these are the debates, Rich.

This is like, why don't you toggle it? No, you don't have the choice today. You don't? No it uh well no giving customer you know you don't have the choice today you don't no you do not have the choice to get back to logical well i want to make sure that i get to see what killian's doing before you know aunt betty thank you so although aunt betty may need more kudos that's right exactly she used the kudo and probably more motivated than killian because he's getting an awful lot of them. Here's mine. So everything has moved to video now.

We're doing Instagram stories and I like to share little video clips. Like when I reach my halfway point and I'm way up in the canyon somewhere, just, hey, this is what it looks like. You gotta add that, come on. Yeah, hopefully now all 175 employees are listening. Yeah, like, and it's great that you can upload a photo, but how about a little video clip

or a series of little video clips that can make that experience more immersive? Like I can go on Instagram stories and see Killian doing his crazy ski thing. But like, if I can see that on Strava and get that same experience there, it seems more integrated. And, you know, that's true to your platform

and what you're trying to do. We totally agree. It's not like you haven't thought about this, of course, right? We're in 100% agreement. We need to talk to James. Definitely one of the aspects. You have the guy from Instagram running the show. One of the challenges, we call it the noise of opportunity.

It's like, there are so many things we could do. And so, but this is, I mean, honestly, this is what people, you know, when people ask, what's the determinant of success in a startup is like picking the right things to do first. Yeah. Because you- You guys have been patient.

You guys, that's one thing I've noticed. Sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, it's patience is important. I think where we boil it all down, we know video is important. And it's a heavy lift. There's no debate that it's not a simple thing to add. In theory, it's like everyone can create the video. How do you get it to come to life? How do you store it? How do you make it accessible around the world? And we also have to think in terms of bandwidth. We have, as we've talked about, millions of users, many of them in places where bandwidth

is not as easily accessible as it is in Europe and the United States. But that said, so LIS is competing with maybe 30 or 40 other things. And some of them are must-haves, can't do without. They touch things like user privacy and security of our data and things like that. We've got to get that right. And then other things are just competing for. We've talked about them for many years, and now it's time to do them. So videos on the list, promise. Can't give you a timeline, but yeah.

Right. At some point. Duly noted. All right. It's coming. Explain to me this new root builder thing. I haven't actually experimented with that yet. Is it still in beta or is it wide now?

If you're on Strava Summit, you have a Summit subscription, you have access to it as early release. And so we're getting a lot of feedback from people who have used it it as early release. And so that's, you know, we're getting a lot of feedback from people who have used it for the first time and are learning sort of what we have to do to bring it up to a standard that we would feel would be ready for a general release.

But the idea is first of all, to give summit members something special because they're paying for the experience, but then also learn more how to make it even better and make it available in some form to everybody. So the way it works is simply you have a map and you know where you're located and you know where you want to sort of end up or a rough route you want to take. You just draw your finger on the screen and we then query our database of all the decisions people have made about do I turn left, do I turn right which trail do I take if I want to go kind of that way

and that information feeds into what route we actually recommend for you so it's a way of effectively crowdsourcing your route you have the benefit of all the potentially hundreds of thousands of other times people have tried to go roughly that way and we try to show you what would be best for you. And then you can go in and modify it further. So that's the essence of the hopefully simple to use on a mobile phone. That was what we're shooting

for, yet powerful enough to give you the right route. Right. So you can like literally draw your finger on the screen from one place to the next, and then it just comes up with the route. But then when I'm out running and I'm, let's say I'm in a new city, like I love to just go and run in a new city. I don't know where the running routes are. But then when I go out running, how do I remember all of that? Like without having to stare at my phone to see which way to turn. So one of the challenges, but you can save the route that we create for you. You can save it and then you can use that route in your record experience on the app, or you can save the route that we create for you. You can save it, and then you can use that route in your record experience on the app, or you can download the route to your Garmin device, other devices as well, I believe. So you can use it.

Now the question is how you're going to know you're on the right path, and that's where you'd love to have audio cues or beats and whistles, whatever it is. Like turn left here. Cue you in. And so that's sort of the evolution of where that would have to go to give you what you're thinking about. Right, so you'd have to look at it and go and just make a mental note of it or pull your phone out.

Remember the turn by turn, turn right on Calabasas or whatever it was that told you to do. It's cool, I like that though. Any other things you got in development that you can publicly share? Yeah, well. You're closer right now closer yeah yes a little bit closer so we are focused heavily this year on something you you probably will never notice in this country but we are focused on um on improving the performance of of everything around strava the upload experience that

you know what how long it takes for your feed to load. And this is particularly important for Android and for countries where bandwidth is lower, where your bandwidth is actually at a premium. And that's coming from the fact that this is where a huge source of growth is. We live in an

iOS data-rich country, and so we forget that most of the world is, you know, actually 70% of the world is Android. And where, you know, you can't think about sort of bandwidth without thinking about cost. Countries where this is expensive for the people who live there. So we're focused on performance and quality and things that go along with that. Now, that may seem like it's not top of the user experience. It's not something somebody's interacting with. But we feel that investments there will pay off when in a few months we turn

to things like discovery, which is taking the root builder, the root picker, the root drawer that we just talked about and expanding to the like, well, here are three or four different options for you based on what we know about you. You like to run this kind of stuff. Here's what we recommend. Instead of doing that, do slightly differently. So moving into discovery is an area where you want to have a really good performant app so that you can get more of the right content down to the, down to the athlete.

So it's an investment that we hope is going to pay off big when we can turn to more athlete-facing features. One of the things I always remind people, 80-plus percent, 82 percent I think today of our membership is outside the United States. And so what Michael's alluding to is just our experience here versus what we've come to learn, the more that we've talked to our greater community, are two different experiences. We have to be really careful with our San Francisco employee base because living in the middle of Silicon Valley, just the way in which Strava performs is fundamentally different. Right. So that's been an area that we've just had to address if we're going to

continue to meet the needs of this global audience. 10 years from now, what's the vision for Strava? 10 years from now, what's the vision for Strava? So it's funny, because I told Michael on the drive over here, I would not say this publicly because it's an internal thing, but I think it makes sense. You're gonna say it now.

We're gonna say it anyway, which is- No one's listening, so don't worry about it. Yeah, except those 38 million Strava members who are all on today. We get really excited internally about creating the next great sports brand of the 21st century. I mean, it hasn't been done yet on digital. The Nikes and the Adidas and the Under Armour's of the world. I mean, there's some great iconic brands that have been built in sports,

but they've all been built with apparel and footwear. So get so excited about what Strava can mean to this global audience, to this active athletic audience. And 10 years from now, I think I loved how you asked earlier about sort of what sort of that in present, I forget the exact phrasing, but sort of what can we do sort of on the ground with folks? You know, how does digital impact that? digital impact that we were sitting at lunch before today's podcast, talking about the influence we can have on events and the way in which we can reshape the event world with Strava. I mean, just imagine what's possible there. We start to work with people who are trying to put on events, not to disrupt, disrupting in a positive way, just the impact that we can have there. So for me, it's all about just continuing to curate this brand in a way where we know we're serving that audience and just thinking about expansion out into these other categories.

Yeah, it's cool. Well, we're in this tidal wave of the self-quantified self, you know, as we were talking about at the outset. And it seems to me like it would be a little bit of a tightrope walk between trying to be, I mean, you guys have been really good about understanding your core audience and building out from there. And I think the temptation would be like, well, now there's meditation and I've got my aura ring for sleep and, you know, I use Headspace and I have to go to all these different apps. Like, let's integrate that experience into one place. And as I'm just thinking out loud, thinking about that, that kind of blows out, you know,

that aperture is too wide for what your core audience is right now. So it's like, how do we capture those who wanna quantify their daily experience and really dial in their health and wellbeing versus being like maintaining that fidelity to the athlete, you know, lifestyle. Well, I think it's, we do talk about this quite a bit.

It's like part of that next 10 years is getting a lot more of those athletes out there to connect to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. And so to some extent, you have to start asking your question, like what else would they want us to do for them and do they want us to bring in meditation and maybe sleep measurement

and well sleep is so integral to the athlete you know lifestyle and experience to be able to really be able to you know quantify that in a very real way that has tangible positive impacts on your athletic performance absolutely so i mean that that's where in the 10-year sweep it's certainly in the view and it's it's something we would consider and it's just a question like where do you put it in the order and uh is it something we're acting on and you know before 2020 or something that's more like the second half of that 10 years but certainly in this in in the view of of that 10 years uh arc and i think the way if it may be helpful to understand how we view, where do good ideas come from? And often they come from the people who work at Strava. We're pretty

self-referential. Many of us do love to be active and most of us love to be active. And so we have come up with ideas as we use Strava. But the majority of our direction comes from actually talking to our community and researching what their needs are. And we developed, you know, we have a team of people who are involved in this and we're trying to get good insights from actually talking to people as opposed to just talking to ourselves. So, and we hear these themes again,

where, you know, how could Strava be a more impactful part of their life? What could it do for them? It includes these things like nutrition and lifestyle and that touches into areas of health that go beyond just your choices about how you're gonna be active today. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The beauty of being an athlete, it never stops. It's just, where are you in the continuum? Where are you in your life cycle, right? So you've either set a goal and decided to go after something with the vengeance and sort of what are all the tools and services you need in order to accomplish that, whether it's a team, whether it's a coach, whether it's a proper nutrition, the right gear. Then you get injured. You're in another part of the life cycle. Okay, what is it to recover from an injury and how can we avoid that injury the next time?

and how can we avoid that injury the next time? You ask over 10 years, I think we can put the athlete aperture on all those categories that you talked about within quantified self, but with that athlete lens that allows us to stay true to our audience. Cool. All right, we've got to land this plane.

But let's close it down with maybe some insight for the new athlete who's listening to this. Maybe the person who's, you know, finally ready to get off the couch. They got to lose 20, 30, 50 pounds. They've never been a runner. They don't own a bike, but they're inspired. They realize it's time.

Like, you know, I can't live this way any longer, but they're intimidated. They're scared. You know, they don't want to go to the bike shop and be judged or it's a feeling of insecurity to go to the running shoe store and try to figure out what kind of running shoes to get. What can we offer something that is unique and really important, which is there are like-minded individuals just like themselves who are there on Strava. We have the community that will be supportive and no one is going to pay attention to the pace or distance

that the person does. That I guarantee. A great photo and a funny title, you will get far more kudos from the Strava community than any kind of performance. So don't, if you have one piece of advice, do not worry about what pace you're going at or how hard you're working out. Just go do it. Just start sweating.

And I guarantee that Strava will be supportive. Yeah, I've never had anyone comment on any of my posts, like, oh, you think you're not that fit. You know, there really isn't that kind of negativity that you see on other platforms. I would add to that just to think about what Strava can do for you when you're just starting out is it's just that we talk about this,

people motivate people. And so connect to others, find them. You can connect other social media in Strava. So it finds the people who you're connected to on Facebook and other social networks already in Strava. So you might want to connect with them, follow them in Strava. They might follow you back. But that connecting to other people is that step that I think completes the loop for that

person who's just starting out. The first run may not feel great, but if you get a couple of kudos from some people you know, you'll be like, okay, I'm gonna do it again. The goal is, in the beginning for anyone starting out, is not about how fast you can get going and how fast eventually you'll be able to run. It's about making sure you don't stop.

You don't decide to get back on the couch. I think that's really where Strava, it brings you into this world, into this community where you're, as Mark said, it's super supportive, where people are there to experience your highs and lows. And if you're willing to post that activity, maybe it's a two mile, one mile run.

You walked part of the way, it doesn't really matter, but they're there to support you. And pretty soon you're gonna be running three miles. You're gonna be running five miles. And you're gonna probably think, maybe I could even do a half marathon. That's the way that we see so many people come into being active using Strava.

Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. How do you guys feel? We did it. It's a great way to spend an afternoon. Good.

Unless we're out on bikes. Well, we could do that too. Yeah. And then we'll upload this verbal workout to Strava, like I said. A lot of wind noise. Yeah. But no, we could do it again tomorrow. We'd have a completely different conversation.

I know. That's the beauty of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll come back. And once you get video going, come back. We can talk about that. We're on the hook, right? Yeah.

38 million people expect video. Right. Tomorrow. We also have about that. Now we're on the hook, right? Now 38 million people expect video tomorrow. We also have to get rich on athletes unfiltered. Yeah, exactly. Let's do it. I'm open to it, man. Yeah, for sure. Cool. So Strava.com, sign up for Summit.

You can follow Mark and Michael on that platform. You can follow me. Easy to find there. Anywhere else you want to point people? That's it. That's pretty much it. else you want to point people? That's it. That's pretty much it. That's the place, right? That's it.

All right, guys. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Rich. Peace. Good stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed that. You can follow both Mark and Michael on Strava at Strava.com.

Also follow me. I'm Rich Roll there. I'm easy to find. And it really is a great way to stay motivated, to hold yourself accountable, to hold your friends accountable, and ultimately, most importantly, to build community. If you would like to support the work we do here on the RRP, there are a couple simple ways to do just that. Just tell your friends about the show, share your favorite episode on social media, take a screen grab of it, tag me so I can identify you there.

Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts, wherever you listen to this. That's probably the most impactful and important thing to make sure you hit that subscribe button. It really helps us out a lot. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts, also super helpful. And you can support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today because I do not do this alone. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering production, show notes, interstitial music, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing that video of the podcast, which you can enjoy on YouTube. Jessica Miranda for her beautiful graphics, DK David Kahn for advertiser

relationships and theme music as always by Analema. Thank you for your attention, for your time, for the love, for the feedback. I do not take it for granted. I greatly appreciate it. And I will see you back here next week with an incredible episode with David Sinclair, PhD. He is a professor in the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an expert on all things longevity and aging. You might've heard him on Joe Rogan. We pick it up where that one leaves off and it's really fantastic. In the meantime, get outside, get moving, get on Strava, whatever you got to do to enjoy the outdoors and build community. Until then, peace. Thank you.